The original was completely anti-empire, anti-war, pro-liberty, anti-police state. They despise the Koch Brothers. I disagreed with a lot of their libertarian economic views, as I do not think that you can simply drop the government's oversight on corporations until a long process of weeding out the systemic controllers and their governmental-enforced tyranny has been done first, but I do make common cause with them in terms of being anti-war.
The Tea Party that most know now is simply Republican reactionary corporatist thugs, with xenophobia, scape-goating, and empiric blood-lust fueling most members. They hate most the original Tea Party agenda. This complete co-opting shows the power of the modern media, as even many politically astute people are not aware of the time line.
The one thing I always say to people who conflate certain types of American libertarians (libertarian thought comes in a huge variety of flavours, much of it left and/or socialistic) with corporatists by calling them supporters of 'Anarchy for rich white men' is to point out that if this were indeed the case, why do not rich white men support the US libertarians? Far from supporting them, they revile them, as the truly powerful banksters and multinationals are fused in a nexus of corporate fascism that relies on big government regulations to crush their competition from small and mid-size firms.
Here is some info links on the first Tea Party, founded in 2006 by Thomas Knapp, and basically disbanded/co-opted by the Rethugs in 2009 (there are no original leaders in any postions of power left):
http://lastfreevoice.wordpress.com/2008/06/06/a-brief-history-of-the-boston-tea-party-part-onehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party_----------------------------------------------------------
Here are some links on left libertarians, anarcho-socialists, etc:
Noted left-libertarians and anarcho-socialists:
Michael Otsuka
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctymio /
Peter Vallentyne
http://klinechair.missouri.edu/Web%20Admin/Vita_Revised.htm#personal Noam Chomsky (he has called his libertarian socialism an anarchist philosophy)
http://planetchomsky.com /
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Other links to left forms of democratic workplaces and social structuring:
"The Democratic Worker-Owned Firm" by David Ellerman
http://www.ellerman.org/Davids-Stuff/Books/demofirm.doc "Libertarianism Without Inequality" by Michael Otsuka
http://ebookee.org/Michael-Otsuka-Libertarianism-without-Inequality_341064.html Why Left-Libertarianism Is Not Incoherent, Indeterminate, or Irrelevant: A Reply to Fried
PETER VALLENTYNE,
HILLEL STEINER, AND
MICHAEL OTSUKA
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctymio/leftlibP&PA.pdf---------------
http://newpol.org /
New Politics, published since 1986 as a semi-annual, follows in the tradition established in its first series (1961-1978) as an independent socialist forum for dialogue and debate on the left. It is committed to the advancement of the peace and anti-intervention movements. It stands in opposition to all forms of imperialism, and is uncompromising in its defense of feminism and affirmative action. In our pages there is broad coverage of labor and social movements, the international scene, as well as emphasis on cultural and intellectual history.
Above all, New Politics insists on the centrality of democracy to socialism and on the need to rely on mass movements from below for progressive social transformation.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Political rights do not originate in parliaments; they are, rather, forced upon parliaments from without. And even their enactment into law has for a long time been no guarantee of their security. Just as the employers always try to nullify every concession they had made to labor as soon as opportunity offered, as soon as any signs of weakness were observable in the workers' organizations, so governments also are always inclined to restrict or to abrogate completely rights and freedoms that have been achieved if they imagine that the people will put up no resistance.
Even in those countries where such things as freedom of the press, right of assembly, right of combination, and the like have long existed, governments are constantly trying to restrict those rights or to reinterpret them by juridical hair-splitting. Political rights do not exist because they have been legally set down on a piece of paper, but only when they have become the ingrown habit of a people, and when any attempt to impair them will meet with the violent resistance of the populace .
Where this is not the case, there is no help in any parliamentary Opposition or any Platonic appeals to the constitution."
– Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory & Practice, 1947
http://www.iwa-ait.org /
http://www.iww.org /
http://workersolidarity.org /
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More libertarian and anarcho socialists:
Cornelius Castoriadis
http://www.agorainternational.org Antonio Negri
http://www.generation-online.org/t/translations.htm#negribm Murray Bookchin
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/bio1.html Arran Gare
http://en.scientificcommons.org/arran_gare --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The fascistic model that's been in place in the US since the so-called Progressive Era of Teddy Roosevelt and the creation of the Federal Reserve under Woodrow Wilson.
What you have is an artificially constructed choice called either 'deregulation' by the so-called right-wing, OR 'government oversight' by the so-called left-wing. Both are false paradigms. The last thing the systemic controllers want is a 'level playing field'.
The problem with the US experiment is not big government per se, it is big government that has morphed in all areas over the last 100 years into nothing more than an enforcement mechanism for the systemic controllers. Agencies that should be for the public good are simple the tools of the elite designed to to crush all competition from small and mid-size firms.
This started in the USA during the above-mentioned Progressive Era under Theodore Roosevelt, wherein huge monopolies like Standard Oil, etc, utilized a 'don't throw me in the briar patch' argument to get the force of government into regulating business practices (regulations that many times in the 100 years since they have written, then had a bought and paid for Congress pass). Far from creating a free market, this quashed their rivals in so many cases, and made it exceedingly hard for small entrepreneurs to compete.
The US Animal ID act is a perfect example, wherein a small sized chicken farmer has to pay exorbitant licensing fees per chicken, thus forcing them out of business, whilst monstrously huge consortiums like Tyson, etc, simply are allowed to buy one large bulk license that covers millions of birds.
Check out New Left historian Gabriel Kolko, who in his book "The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916." In it, he lays out a case for the rise of modern corporatist system during the Progressive Era. This in turn, allows for the violation of a anti-fascistic principle – No socialization of losses and privatization of gains (ie the confluence of big business and big government in mutual reinforcement). http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-Conservatism-Gabriel-Kolko/dp/0029166500 http://www.4shared.com/document/Psy6aMNF/Gabriel_Kolko_-_The_Triumph_Of.html pdf
Kolko was soon joined by other New Left historians such as William Appleman Williams in challenging the reigning "corporate liberal" orthodoxy. Rather than "the people" being behind these "progressive reforms," it was the very elite business interests themselves responsible, in an attempt to cartelize, centralize and control what was impossible due to the dynamics of a competitive and decentralized economy.
.............in advancing the corporate liberalism idea whereby the old Progressive historiography of the "interests" versus the "people" was reinterpreted as a collaboration of interests aiming towards stabilizing competition . According to Grob and Billias, "Kolko believed that large-scale units turned to government regulation precisely because of their inefficiency" and that the "Progressive movement - far from being antibusiness - was actually a movement that defined the general welfare in terms of the well-being of business" .
Kolko, in particular, broke new ground with his critical history of the Progressive Era. He discovered that free enterprise and competition were vibrant and expanding during the first two decades of the twentieth century; meanwhile, corporations reacted to the free market by turning to government to protect their inherent inefficiency from the discipline of market conditions. This behavior is known as corporatism, but Kolko dubbed it "political capitalism." Kolko's thesis "that businessmen favored government regulation because they feared competition and desired to forge a government-business coalition" is one that is echoed by many observers today . Former Harvard professor Paul H. Weaver uncovered the same inefficient and bureaucratic behavior from corporations during his stint at Ford Motor Corporation (see Weaver's The Suicidal Corporation <1988>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Kolko http://users.crocker.com/~acacia/kolko.html http://miltenoff.tripod.com/Kolko.html http://www.stateofnature.org/liberalElitesAnd.html cheers
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